May 6, 2012Legends of the Great Flood Part III – Yonaguni, Sunken City off Havana?

The Greek philosopher Plato wrote of the legendary city of Atlantis in his dialogues of Critias and Timaeus. Scholars debate whether or not Plato fabricated this story of Atlantis to be told as a parable or if the story was based on an actual myth from antiquity.

In any regard, there have been hundreds of books, magazine articles, blogs, television shows, documentaries, alien conspiracies and other works produced that have tried to correlate the Atlantis legend to a location on a map.

Nothing mystical, nothing magical, just sea rise and the tendency for humans to settle and construct defensive formation on shorelines; getting covered up by water over time as the polar caps and glaciers melt and freeze during interglacial periods.

I have been following the discovery of underwater sites for quite a few years. Each time one of these sites is found, some skeptic will show up and do their best to debunk the site as a naturally occurring formation. I believe in a healthy amount of skepticism, but sometimes skeptics also resort to speculation when trying to dismiss potential discoveries.

Take for example, the underwater rock formations of Yonaguni. The Yonaguni underwater rock formations are located to the south of Japan and east of Taiwan. The top of the formation is about 5 meters below the surface and extends down another 20 meters. Skeptics of Yonaguni proclaim that it is no different than the Giant’s Causeway, or perhaps Old Rag Mountain. But if you visit the links for those formations or do some image searching, you won’t see anything similar to Yonaguni. To me, Yonaguni looks more like Machu Picchu (pictured below) than something obviously created by nature such as Giant’s Causeway. One of the skeptical arguments related to the Yonaguni site is that earthquakes caused the rock to shear into geometric shapes, which is possible of course.

In 1954, Leicester Hemmingway (Ernest Hemmingway’s brother), took an airplane from the United States to Havana, Cuba. Hemingway was looking out the window of the plane and at one point exclaimed “A city of glistening marble” was visible below the sea. He then spent the next forty years of his life looking for it, but never found it. In 2009, a team of researchers found what they believe to be a sunken city in the western Carribean; roughly 40-70 feet below the surface of the water.

At 40 to 70 feet below the surface, this site close to Havana would be roughly 4-9 thousand years old.

I talk to people who often tell me, “We know more about space than our own oceans. We should spend more time examining the oceans.” There is a certain wisdom to those words as we seem to discover things thought previously improbable by science.

It seems that new species are discovered such as once thought to be extinct plants and sea life, giant squids and extremophiles each time we set out to explore the ocean’s depths.